“Silence and Speech: The Dialectics of the Spiritual Life” may have been the most popular course I ever taught. A former student recently wrote and reminded me how important it was for her growth some 25 years ago. She’s not the only one. In a recent newsletter from our Orthodox monastery in Canones, Abbot Silouan wrote about The World of Silence by Max Picard. That favorite book was essential reading for the course. Another reminder.

Picard taught me that silence is not the absence of speech but a substance in itself, tangible and full of potential. Silence is the breeding-ground for consciousness, and language is the engine for creation. We look out our window in silence, we see the natural surroundings, and we word them as tree or grass, sky or bird. At the moment of creation in Genesis, Adam names the world and its creatures as they come into being. Picard was good at pointing out the great silence from which all creation emerges which, without much of a leap, some might identify as God.

My premise in that long-ago course was that true silence is the pool out of which honest speech. So often speech simply begets speech, and around us it sounds like a bunch of squirrels chattering endlessly in response to one another without thinking. You know how it is: you hear someone assert something and before the thought has been fully expressed you’ve got the response started in your head. Words drown out other words and no active listening takes place. Here there is no pool of silence from which words emerge, but only words piled on words.

In the Gospel of John we find a disputed but well-loved passage where a woman caught in adultery is brought before Jesus, as before a judge, for the prescribed sentence. You can hear the crowd shouting and murmuring in the background. In response Jesus bends to the earth and scribbles in the sand. I have always been fascinated by that response. No words. No direct gestures involving the charge or the woman herself. The crowd disperses at his silence and, upon looking up, he sees the woman standing alone and he dismisses her, forgiven. The power of silence.

The monastic tradition is full of silence. Silence is one justification for that communal tradition, whose diminution in both numbers and power may be one of the reasons we are awash in a sea of words. Communication is born in silence; we know that in our best moments, even if we don’t act like we know it.

There is a dark side to this. Silence in the face of tyranny or terror is not useful. Silence in the face of injustice is the wrong response. The silence of most of the churches in the face of the Holocaust or the Ukrainian Famine is a point of shame, not of honesty. Silence in the face of suffering and persecuted people in our world is not right.

Nonetheless I choose to stress the luminous aspect of silence. Many folk traditions trace the origin of words to a magical or mystical source. That source is always grounded on silence, which is the treasury from which words emerge. Others may think what they will but I remain convinced, as was Max Picard, that God is the source out of which words emerge and that God is, thus, in some way the deep silence that underlies all creation. Paul Tillich defined God as the “ground of being,” the source from which all else arises. Praise God from whom all blessings flow…or in the words of Psalm 62 (my translation), “my soul in silence waits for God.”

Fr. Gabriel Rochelle is pastor of St Anthony of the Desert Orthodox Mission, Las Cruces. The church web site is www.stanthonylc.org.